A Metapragmatic Awareness Study Of The Functions Of You Know

The use of discourse markers is frequent in verbal communication. Discoursemarkers convey procedural rather than propositional meanings and the abandoning ofthem won’t affect the grammatical integrity of the sentence. Discourse markers signalthe sequent relations between the current discourse and the previous one. What’smore, the meaning of a discourse marker is defined in a specific context. Since1970s,discourse markers have attracted attention of many scholars from home and abroad.The analysis of discourse markers from the perspective of metapragmatic awarenessis quite a new issue.This paper makes a tentative exploration of the pragmatic functions of you know,focusing on the role of metapragmatic awareness. How does metapragmaticawareness affect the speaker’s use of discourse markers and what kind ofmetapragmatic awareness is implied by the use of discourse marker. After analysis ofan amount of corpora, some major findings are made. Firstly, the functions of youknow is pragmatic and dynamic under the influence of contexts. Secondly, the use ofdiscourse marker you know implies various kinds of metapragmatic awareness. Thispaper tries to explore the cognitive motivation of the use of discourse marker you know’s pragmatic functions with the focus of role of metapragmatic awareness.According to the different metapragmatic awareness you know implies, this papermakes categorization of this discourse marker from textual level and interactionallevel. At textual level, you know reflects three groups of metapragmatic awareness:metapragmatic awareness of transition (to start a new topic, to continue the topic, toconvert a topic, to conclude the topic); metapragmatic awareness of editing orencoding (to repair the information, to stall a while for lexical searching and forhesitation); metapragmatic awareness of structuring (to introduce the followingexplanation, evaluation, question). At the interactional level, you know reflects sixgroups of metapragmatic awareness: metapragmatic awareness of mitigating,metapragmatic awareness of achieving coherence, metapragmatic awareness ofsecuring hearer’s comprehension, metapragmatic awareness of ensuring hearer’sinvolvement, metapragmatic awareness of highlihting certain information,metapragmatic awareness of gaining persuasion. Thirdly, metapragmatic awareness isclosely related with mental space.Such study as analysis from the perspective of metapragmatic awareness istheoretically significant as it explores the cognitive mechanism behind language useand it will definitely provide new theoretical reasoning to the analysis of discoursemarkers. This study can enrich and enlarge the traditional analysis of discoursemarkers and to find a new route between the theory of metapragmatic awareness andits pragmatic practice.